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[Kadzar]

Reading this thread from March, a question came to my mind, and was probably hinted at, but never really discussed: are the various "races" and alien species in fantasy and sci fi, respectively, actually necessary? All too often, these seem not so fantastic or alien, but are pretty much just humans with some exaggerated traits and different physiology. In fact in most media, sentient nonhumans seem to be, at best, allegorical representations of the various qualities of mankind and, at worst, racist caricatures.

[Bauglir]

Yes. Yes, they are necessary.

[Vattic]

They aren't necessary for all sci-fi. Dune gets by pretty well.

[Jacob/Lee]

Unless the story has some sort of "master race" (like the Forerunners from Halo) that seeded most of the galaxy with animals/an animal that were relatively the same, there should be some abstract and fairly unthinkable creatures in Sci Fi stories and such.

[ChairmanPoo]

I find rubberhead aliens annoying. It's one of the reasons why I've never been into Star Trek...

[alway]

Keep in mind, one of the major goals of sci-fi is social commentary in such a way as to remove the normal prejudices associated with discussing the issue. H G Wells' novels, an example of older sci-fi, were typically an examination of society. The Time Machine was first and foremost social commentary about solidification of social hierarchies [the Eloi and Murloks were literally the rich and the poor, separate to the point where they evolved into different species]. War of the Worlds was a novel with a huge amount of social commentary; the first being the setting. It pictured a world in which the (at the time) great British Empire were themselves conquered by another civilization in a manner similar to how they conquered their own colonies. It explored many aspects of humanity's reactions to hardship through the various characters he meets along the way, and various other commentary. If these ideas had simply been written straight up without the guise of sci-fi, the resulting text would not only have been rather dry, but any reading it would be inclined to think about it through the visor of their own preconceptions.

Aliens aren't there to be accurately representative of aliens, they are there to be tools for exploring humanity and telling stories. Because, honestly, we haven't the slightest clue as to what aliens will actually be.

[UltraValican]

They are, Warhammer 40k would just be depressing without dem Orks and the Tau.

[Criptfeind]

I guess it really depends on what type of conflict you want in your story. Sometimes you need that outer alien force, and sometimes you can get by on just humans. And of course I would not be too hard on writers for making just humans with hats aliens, that fact that humans are so differing ourselves and that anything alien would of course need to be well... alien in design makes it really really hard to come up with something truly alien that is not already done to death by other writers.

They aren't necessary for all sci-fi. Dune gets by pretty well.

I don't know, there were are a lot of "humans" that were questionable so. It sorta bothered me a bit how silly it was.

[GlyphGryph]

Are the non-human but almost human races really necessary? Well it depends on what you mean - would you want to get rid of them completely, or are they not bizarre enough to serve a purpose?
After all, almost no fantasy or sci-fi book is about alien races, not really. They are about examining human traits, human conditions, human potentials, and human stories, because those are the stories people connect with, and, well... write what you know is generally given advice for a reason. At the same time, they exist in the realm of the hypothetical - they often want to tweak human culture, human history, even human physiology, and play a game of "what if". What would humans be under these conditions? Sure, its impossible. Heck, we probably wouldn't even call them human anymore... and then boom, a race is born.
These races are also useful in making commentary on modern day real-life race relations, they often serve as important plot points (shared ancestry is popular), they give a world a feeling that there is more than just people. I mean, as much of a stretch as humanoid aliens might be, I can imagine it would be a lot more so if they were ACTUALLY human, don't you think? Or we could have no aliens at all, but that certainly changes things! So there's plenty of reasons to want things that are alien, to explore concepts humans don't really let you explore, but you want them to be familiar enough, comfortable enough, that you don't need to interrupt the concept to explore what the alien actually IS.

These regular human-variant races aren't always true, though - look at the alien's in the Blue Adept series (Piers Anthony's better series) for example. Enders Game. Starship Troopers, Ur-Quan Masters. Look at many of the threads about this very topic that happen in Creative. Heck, there are even some popular player races in my own fantasy/sci-fi campaigns world that are very un-human - fridge-sized telekinetic beetles, six-armed dogs (that's in addition to the four legs), giant cybernetically enhanced scorpions, floating land jellyfish-squid. And I like their presence in all those works, because they really help explore concepts and ideas you might never see at all if you stuck to normal humans!

From good authors, you'll get weirder aliens when the serve the purpose of the story, plain humans when aliens won't help, and humanoid aliens when you need to explore alien concepts within a familiar framework.

[Vattic]

I've got to admit I get a little annoyed at all the all too human aliens in fiction. Oddly it bothers me more in films than other media. One author I easily forgive is Douglass Adams but then he does have some strange aliens like the hyperintelligent shade of the colour blue.

I don't know, there were are a lot of "humans" that were questionable so. It sorta bothered me a bit how silly it was.

Fair enough. Things did get more than a little odd after the first two books. I still say the first two are a good example of sci-fi working without any true aliens. It was just the first example that came to mind.

[GlyphGryph]

Asimov's Foundation series is probably an even better example. Heck, most of his books are human-only, even the ones the implicitly imply the existence of alien life.

[Duke 2.0]

Aliens aren't there to be accurately representative of aliens, they are there to be tools for exploring humanity and telling stories. Because, honestly, we haven't the slightest clue as to what aliens will actually be.

 Pretty much.

 No mater how you shake it, any intelligent use of aliens is gonna be a reflection of human issues and characteristics. Otherwise why include them in the story? Just to look good and be there?

[Girlinhat]

Douglas Adams is special case.  His entire career can be described as "an elegant hand-wave".

That said, the "human-like aliens" is rather simple, I think.  The media (be that the audience of the publisher) wants "something exotic" so they get aliens, but then they want "something that's similar enough that they can put it in earthly terms" so you get a girl with green skin instead.  The common man doesn't want to wonder at the vitality of a 30 foot long sentient slug, he wants to see a man with antennae and a different culture.  That, ultimately, is what most of Star Trek boils down to.  It's humans with a different culture, the money-hungry Ferengi and the calmly direct Vulcans, and then they get a few outward changes to match their culture.

True aliens are found with writers who don't care, usually the very hard sci-fi writers, or else the ones who say "you can't understand my books, they're too deep" and are full of crap.  But, I read a good book/anthology called Strange Relations (will try to find the book so I can list some authors) who wrote about some very very strange aliens.  One was a centaur-shaped insectoid with a ventral spine, another was a large hollow husk about 50 feet across, that lived stationary atop hills and communicated with its sisters via radio - which made tall hills very valuable.  They reproduced by catching nearby wildlife and slamming them against their 10 foot tall cervix, and when the wounds healed it would explode into cancer that would become embryos, making every individual female.  Alastair Reynolds, one of my favorites, wrote about a super-dense nebula that had its own intelligence, of a sort, and a white dwarf star that had become a supercomputer due to the peculiar pressure and motion in its core.

They're plenty of abstract aliens, just not on TV.  Humanoid aliens sells tickets.  One of the only mostly strange aliens I can recall is Pilot from Farscape.  Moya too, to an extent, but the "living ship" is kinda made to fit a mold that the show demanded, so it's not entirely done right.

[Lectorog]

Simply enough, they're interesting.

People in space? We've done that in reality.
Aliens + People in space is fiction, and as such more interesting at a basic level.

People at a low technology level and typical culture; that's a copy of a period of history.
Add in some occasional magic, fanciful stuff - that's mythology / tales from the time.
Add in ridiculous races, and you've got some fancy fantasy.

These are just additions that enhance a basic level. Authors work off of the basic level.
Many "advanced" authors don't write as standard, and just use aliens as a tool, or for other reasons. A lot of Sci-Fi authors don't use aliens at all.
It's just another tool for looking at issues and adding a basic entertainment/interest value.

That's how it works in my head, at least.

Oh, and human-like aliens: People talking to humanoid individuals makes more sense than people talking to space fish. There's a reason we can't talk to animals, and that projects itself into fiction.
There are obviously exceptions. IIRC, The Reality Dysfunction had an early chapter entirely on the evolution of an intransient race and their planet.

[Willfor]

As an ~aspiring fantasy author~ I'll just throw out my own take on it. I like to explore truly alien concepts mixed in with human concepts in some parts. In other ways, I like getting into the thought patterns of an entirely different being than myself. The key is not to make a fantasy race that wears a hat. The key is to define where they came from biologically, and then layer on top of that a culture that they came from, and then layer on top of that a personality that is distinct and individual to them. I don't usually make fantasy races that are just human-but-different, but I do have to work within the bounds that they can communicate in some way. Sometimes.

Example;

A race that is sort-of like an upjumped branch of mosquitoes. They have a bit of divine protection which has kept them alive through the ages, but they can't usually get their numbers up high enough to really be a majority population wherever they are. They live among other cultures, and generally take the one that they are in as their own. People find them useful because they are adept at learning lots of forms of communication, even if they find it hard to pronounce anything exactly correct due to the way they make communicative sound.

Biological element: They are more fragile than most species, but generally find protection in symbiosis. They require blood from other species after mating to stimulate their birthing process. Females are larger than the males, and generally have more personality to them and an extended lifespan due to dimorphic genders.

Cultural element: They tend to fit in best in human cities, actually, in this particular world, and so they try to emulate the people around them to make sure they don't appear too alien. This doesn't work very well, but they are useful, which tends to keep them at peace with their neighbors. Kind of.

Personal element: A female who is passing her sexual prime gets a job working for a man who is not adept whatsoever at magic. She is adept at magic. They talk about their failing relationships, and begin to confide in each other about the peculiarities of their own situations. You see, she's feeling bad because two of her mates have left her for a more viable partner, and -- like an idiot -- she hadn't put them under contract like she had with her other three. Oh, and his marriage is slowly falling apart because his wife only married him to spite her mother in the first place. ... It's complicated.

The best comment I have gotten on this is when a beta reader told me I made him feel bad for a mosquito, and that he was very conflicted on this point.

Unfortunately, I never got to the good parts of this story, this is just an outline of where it was going, but yeah.